


Hail Satan!

by within_a_dream



Category: The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton - The Mountain Goats (song)
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, institutionalization
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-25
Updated: 2018-05-25
Packaged: 2019-05-13 12:55:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14749269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/within_a_dream/pseuds/within_a_dream
Summary: The best ever death metal band out of DentonWill in time both outpace and outlive you!Hail Satan!A look into that outpacing and outliving





	Hail Satan!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gamerfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gamerfic/gifts).



The walls of Cyrus's new room were off-white, the kind that hospitals and schools choose because it looks dingy anyway so there's no way to tell if it's actually dirty or not. He hadn't been allowed to bring any posters, but they still told him that he couldn't hang anything. (They wouldn't have liked his band posters, he was sure of that.)

The window in Cyrus's new room was high up, and dirty, and didn't really let much light in. He still spent a lot of time staring out of it, catching glimpses of the birds and the sun. It wasn't like he had anything else to do. His Walkman was left at home just like everything else, and the only entertainment in the common room was a selection of nauseatingly “age-appropriate” books.

There was an empty bed on the other side of his room. Cyrus guessed he'd be sharing with someone eventually, but for now he enjoyed the privacy. It was nice to come back from group therapy and individual therapy and the shit that passed as classes to stare at the wall and imagine he was frying his parents with laser vision. Sometimes he sang under his breath--quietly, quietly, so the hall monitor didn't hear. Other times he traced out new lyrics on the wall with his fingertip. He’d thought about writing them down in the journals they gave out at group for about thirty seconds before realizing what an absolutely horrible idea that was. He parroted his therapist’s words into the journal instead, pretending not to notice when it was left open on his desk after he came back from class, and kept the lyrics in his head.

At the beginning of each week, usually Monday, a letter from Jeff came for him. No one read the mail first, but Jeff still wrote cryptically. Cyrus liked that. It made him feel like a POW, getting coded letters from his friend in the field. Sometimes he imagined planning an escape, winding his sheets together into a rope and rappelling down the window in the dead of night to return in triumph to his hometown. He was too far off the ground for it to work, but he enjoyed thinking about it when his therapist wouldn't stop droning on or he was especially bored during group.

Jeff's first letter took him by surprise. Cyrus couldn't stop replaying his parents' discovery in his head, over and over and over, and he thought maybe Jeff had decided to cut his losses with Cyrus, or Jeff's parents had decided that Cyrus was too much of a bad influence. But the first Monday he was at the new school, his name got called during breakfast and he was handed a wrinkled-up envelope with his name in Jeff's handwriting on the front.

_ I miss having you in math class. Mr. Johnson is even worse than Abbott was last year. _

_ I tried to fix up our drums but they were pretty beat up. I'm working at the gas station on weekends, so I'm hoping to buy a new set by June. _

_ Hope your classes are less boring than mine. _

The handwriting was legible, which meant Jeff had spent ages writing it. Cyrus had seen the notebooks where he kept his songs, and even Jeff had trouble reading them sometimes.

Jeff hated writing, said he couldn't wait until he was out of school and never had to handwrite anything ever again. And he'd sat down and written Cyrus a letter. That was something.

 

Cyrus was real sorry to hear about the drums. He said so in his letter back, carefully avoiding any mention of how it was his parents who'd trashed them. His dad had come home early from work, just to ambush Cyrus and Jeff when they were practicing, because he and Cyrus's mom were so very worried about his guitar and Jeff's drumset and what they'd been drawing on them. It didn't give them any right to tear up his and Jeff's instruments like that, instruments they'd bought with their own damn money. That was what got him about all of this. So they wanted to send him off to some bullshit school to get his head fixed. That was their right as his parents, he guessed. But they hadn't bought him his trapset, he'd done that himself with his cashiering paycheck. He and Jeff both, really. They hadn't bought him the guitars, he and Jeff had both saved up for those, and spent hours fixing them up and decorating the bodies with sharpies and paint and learning how to keep them in tune when the pegs were perpetually loose and decorating the bodies with Sharpies and paint. And now their drums were gone, and Cyrus was sure his guitar had gone the same way as soon as his parents sent him off. Jeff got his out, Cyrus thought, but his parents wouldn't have hesitated to trash that too.

_ Sorry about the drums. I can pay you back, or ask my parents to. Classes here are even worse than back home. The classrooms don't even have windows… _

 

_ No problem _ , Jeff wrote back,  _ they sounded like shit anyway,  _ and Cyrus saw the apology between the words.

His letters got long, and Jeff only ever wrote back three or four sentences, but he always wrote back. It got to be the only thing Cyrus looked forward to, that and Friday June 13 th , when he'd be free. He filled out his worksheets and sat sullenly in group therapy and imagined scrawling angry black tallymarks across his dingy white bedroom wall to count down to the day he would walk out of this shithole.

 

_ My cousin owns a garage outside of Decatur, and he says I can have the apartment up top _ , Jeff wrote in May, and Cyrus knew he meant  _ we _ .  _ There's enough room for a drumset and amps, and no one to hear me practice after hours. _

No one to wreck their instruments, or lock Cyrus up. He taped the letter to his wall, and kept counting down the days.

 

On the 15 th , Cyrus's mom came to get him. She smiled when he got in the car, and Cyrus made himself smile back.

"You know this was for your own good, right, honey? I didn't see anything else I could do."

"I know." His smile felt like it was about to shatter, but she didn't notice.

 

That night, after both his parents fell asleep, Cyrus packed a suitcase, grabbed his notebooks from the back of his closet (his parents hadn't found them, although they'd gotten rid of his guitar), and got the hell out. He'd been planning a note for months, but he still had no idea what to say when he wrote it out.

He settled on,  _ Moving in with Jeff. I know why you did what you did, but I can't live here anymore. See you around. _

 

Cyrus and Jeff drove off in Jeff's beat-up Escort as the sun rose, and they didn't look back once.

 

Cyrus resisted the temptation to call his parents the next day, helped along by the fact that the apartment over the garage didn't have a phone yet. He woke up to an empty bed on the other side of the room, Jeff downstairs already working with his cousin. Cyrus noodled around on his guitar, getting the feel back for having frets under his fingers after a year at boarding school for bad kids. The strings burned his fingertips like they hadn't since his first weeks playing.

 

The day after that, he took the car and went looking for "Help Wanted" signs. If he was going to stay here, he wasn't going to be a deadbeat.

 

That Christmas, he and Jeff sprung for one of those photo cards to send to their families. They went heavy on the eyeliner and wore black shirts with torn-off sleeves that showed off their new matching tattoos.  _ Merry Christmas _ , they put on the front in a flowing gold script,  _ and Hail Satan! _


End file.
